This place where I live is a tomb, a theme park of death where every day is Memorial Day. Tens of thousands of them died here when the country tried and failed to divide and reform like an amoeba; and here where the blue and gray clashed, we remember our dead with gift shops, picnics and marble obelisks that kiddies climb on but no one reads.

That was a different kind of war -- brother against brother, hypothetically and sometimes literally, and maybe that's why they tell it so different. If you press the buttons on the monuments and hear the old men talk, the veterans of 140 years ago don't discuss the enemy as we do now. Each side sings of the valor of the foe; each voice praises the pride, the strength of the soldiers dressed in the other color. What honor was there, after all, in the defeat of a weak and unglorious opponent? And what honor may be preserved by the losing side, if the victors are pathetic scoundrels? No, in defeat it is better to have been bested by an opponent both cunning and courageous, for if the victorious foe was unworthy, then you are more unworthy still.

Speak well of those you have conquered, and of those who have conquered you in turn. This is the way it was done. I think that even now we understand this on some level; I think that this is why we still read All Quiet on the Western Front, even though it tells the story of our enemy. We want to know that those who fight against us are brave, and human. If our enemy is less than that, then we are lesser still for our assault -- or even our defense against them.

Only just now there is a monument to those who fought (with us or for us) in the second world war. It is there on the lawn in DC, and it is appropriately massive, if a little late in coming. I watch the old men on TV, doddering about the green in their shriveled skins and decorated dress uniforms, and it saddens me to know how few of them have made it to see this belated and permanent thanks.

I consider my own grandfather, a man in his seventies who was then too young to go to war, though his older brother left to fight. Now it might be a vacation package: Africa, Italy, France. My uncle was a good-looking guy in uniform, I've seen the old sepia-and-whites that prove it. But like so many others, the tall, quick fellow who always called me ma cherie and kissed my hand in greeting will not be on the lawn today to witness the memorial's debut.

The monument itself is grand and classic, a tribute to the enormous accomplishment and, indirectly, to an adversary so exceptional that an entire world was forced to unite to overcome it. Remember what you will and hate what you feel you must, but if the task had not been so tremendous, the esteem in which we hold our elders would not be so great.

Some years ago I was with my father in a mall, taking a small, perfect ticket to be framed. "Woodstock!" The girl behind the counter at the frame shop squealed. "Did you go?" He told her that no, he had not attended, but that he had come by the ticket and he wanted to preserve it. "Why didn't you go?" she asked, so he said, "I was out of the country at the time." "Really? How come?" "Because Uncle Sam sent me." "Oh, where were you?" "Southeast Asia." "Why would you go there instead of Woodstock?"

We stared at her in dumb amazement, and the girl's coworker -- a lad who was swifter on the uptake -- took the moment to kick her in the shins. "He was in Vietnam" the boy whispered. And we all sighed a laugh at the youth of today, and a moment of awkward cultural ignorance. But the boy whispered it, out of the side of his mouth, because even after all this time it sounds a little dirty to those who only know of it from movies. But I went to The Wall once to see the offerings there, and it is a quiet, penitent place where people go to remember.

Again, on the news today, three more casualties in the non-war against the non-terrorists with their non-weaponsofmassanything someplace far away. I feel deeply sorry for the people we sent who weren't given enough preparation, or warning, or back-up for a proper operation. I'm sorry for the people who hate to have us there and can't afford to see us leave yet. I'm tired of the pictures of the smug white trash girl with a leash. I'm sick of the burning Hummers and the unreleased things that leak their way to the world in poisonous drips and pixels.

Here, now, the media creates for us a new tomb to call home, a wireless world where half a globe is half a minute's download, and no one needs to remember anything because the present is so much more than most of us can stand.

One of the old men on the lawn, an 80-something retired paratrooper, cried to the camera at the mention of Iraq. While the waterworks flowed, he stuttered about how it broke his heart every time another one died over there, and how it made no sense to him, and how he wished we'd bring them home. He spoke of remembered sons in southeast Asia, and remembered grandchildren in the Middle East, and he wondered at it all aloud.

For a moment I was seized by the impulse to hop a plane, right now, to go to the lawn and find that old guy and give him a hug. I would hand him a red paper poppy like the one the American Legion man gave me in front of Wal-Mart.

Cherie Priest is the author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. WWII Monument photo from whitehouse.gov.